For this week’s Freeware Frenzy, I will be reviewing Trillian Basic 3.1 by Cerulean Studios. Many of you may have already heard about this program, but may not have tried it. Trillian is an all-in-one messaging program that allows you to connect to AIM, IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger all at once. Cerulean offers Trillian Basic for free and Trillian Pro for $25.

I myself use AIM and IRC on a daily basis, so the idea of having one program for two functions appealed to me. Let’s dive in.

Installation was smooth and quick. Upon Launch, I was asked which IM programs I used and I entered my screen names and passwords. The main window of Trillian is similar to all IM programs, a long skinny window with all buddies listed. Trillian uses small, colored circles for each of your connections: Yellow for AIM, White for IRC, Green for ICQ, etc. Clicking on them opens options menus for connection status, away messages, and chat rooms for AIM, channels for IRC, etc. Trillian supports a full, tabbed, and mini view, and when enabled, docking with either side of your screen. Tabbed View sets up Trillian with buddy list under one tab, a Links Tab and a Tasks tab, which takes the place of the colored circles in Full mode.

Trillian makes it easy to create connections, with a simple wizard. I was able to join the PCMech IRC channel easily after selecting a server on Undernet.

As this is primarily a program for chatting, I’ll spend some time on that.
My AIM connected instantly, carrying over all of my existing AIM buddy lists and preferences. Trillian takes a moment or so longer then AIM to connect, simply because it is making multiple connections. When my buddy list loads, all the names are shown, and it takes a few seconds for Trillian to show who is Away. It does so with a small “brb” sign next to each name. Active buddies are listed on top, with a gold circle, but you can configure what order you want everything.

When you are Instant Messaging, Trillian uses its own set of Emoticons with sound. When you type smilies, such as , and , Trillian converts them into icons. Typing “LOL” in caps, will play a laughter sound. You can also choose icons from a menu, which is massive, and contains everything from a smilie to a rainbow.  All sounds and emoticons are easily disabled. Trillian uses Tabbed chatting, to minimize clutter, and allows you to change window transparency, incase you forgot what’s under your conversation. An interesting feature in the chat is what Trillian calls Instant Lookup, where you can double-click on a word to look it up in the dictionary or on Wikipedia.com. Trillian automatically underlines the words it thinks you might like to look up. When I typed “Michael Jordan” I could hover my mouse and read a short bio. Nifty.

Perusing the Preferences, I found all of the standard options found in all IM programs: Formatting text, file transfers, contact list setup, sound notifications, conversation logging, connection options and more. Trillian supports custom skins, so you can tweak its look much more then some programs.

Upgrading to Trillian Pro gives you dozens of extra features, should you need them. All of the differences can be found in these charts: http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/compare/ Some of these features are already available in free programs like AIM, such as Video Chat, so be aware of what you need before you upgrade.

After spending some time with Trillian, I can certainly see its usefulness. If you have contacts on all of the IM networks, and need to communicate with them simultaneously, Trillian is the answer to your desktop full of windows. However, you are like me and use only one or two programs, Trillian is not necessary. You are more then familiar with your program(s) of choice by now, and Trillian doesn’t offer anything so new that makes it worth a download. If you are interested, check it out for yourself, it’s only an 8MB download. As for me, you’ll find me on AIM.